“Oh, I usually did,” Roger assured her. “Though once, when I was seven or so, I got up my nerve, stood up on the bed and peed on the windowsill—the Reverend had just told me that pissing on the doorposts is supposed to keep a ghost from coming in the house.”
Claire laughed delightedly, the firelight dancing in her eyes. “Did it work?”
“Well, it would have worked better had the window been open,” Roger said, “but the ghosts didn’t come in, no.”
They laughed together, and then one of the small awkward silences that had punctuated the evening fell between them, the sudden realization of enormity gaping beneath the tightrope of conversation. Claire sat beside him, watching the fire, her hands moving restlessly among the folds of her gown. The light winked from her wedding rings, silver and gold, in sparks of fire.
“I’ll take care of her, you know,” Roger said quietly, at last. “You do know that, don’t you?”
Claire nodded, not looking at him.
“I know,” she said softly. He could see the tears, caught trembling at the edge of her lashes, glowing with firelight. She fumbled in the pocket of her gown, and drew out a long white envelope.
“You’ll think me a dreadful coward,” she said, “and I am. But I … I honestly don’t think I can do it—say goodbye to Bree, I mean.” She stopped, to bring her voice under control, and then held out the envelope to him.
“I wrote it all down for her—everything I could. Will you …?”
Roger took the envelope. It was warm from resting next to her body. From some obscure feeling that it must not be allowed to grow cold before it reached her daughter, he thrust it into his own breast pocket, feeling the crackle of paper as the envelope bent.
“Yes,” he said, hearing his own voice thicken. “Then you’ll go …”
“Early,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Before dawn. I’ve arranged for a car to pick me up.” Her hands twisted together in her lap. “If I—” She bit her lip, then looked at Roger pleadingly. “I don’t know, you see,” she said. “I don’t know whether I can do it. I’m very much afraid. Afraid to go. Afraid not to go. Just—afraid.”
“I would be, too.” He held out his hand and she took it. He held it for a long time, feeling the pulse in her wrist, light and fast against his fingers.
After a long time, she squeezed his hand gently and let go.
“Thank you, Roger,” she said. “For everything.” She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the lips. Then she rose and went out, a white ghost in the darkness of the hall, borne on the Hallowe’en wind.
Roger sat on for some time alone, feeling her touch still warm on his skin. The jack-o’-lantern was nearly burned out. The smell of candle wax rose strongly in the restless air, and the pagan gods looked out for the last time, through eyes of guttering flame.
23
CRAIGH NA DUN
The early morning air was cold and misty, and I was glad of the cloak. It had been twenty years since I’d worn one, but with the sorts of things people wore nowadays, the Inverness tailor who’d made it for me had not found an order for a woolen cloak with a hood at all odd.
I kept my eyes on the path. The crest of the hill had been invisible, wreathed in mist, when the car had left me on the road below.
“Here?” the driver had said, peering dubiously out of his window at the deserted countryside. “Sure, mum?”
“Yes,” I’d said, half-choked with terror. “This is the place.”
“Aye?” He looked dubious, in spite of the large note I put in his hand. “D’ye want me to wait, mum? Or to come later, to fetch ye back?”
I was sorely tempted to say yes. After all, what if I lost my nerve? At the moment, my grip on that slippery substance seemed remarkably feeble.
“No,” I said, swallowing. “No, that won’t be necessary.” If I couldn’t do it, I would just have to walk back to Inverness, that was all. Or perhaps Roger and Brianna would come; I thought that would be worse, to be ignominiously retrieved. Or would it be a relief?
The granite pebbles rolled beneath my feet and a clod of dirt fell in a small rushing shower, dislodged by my passage. I couldn’t possibly really be doing this, I thought. The weight of the money in my reinforced pocket swung against my thigh, the heavy certainty of gold and silver a reminder of reality. I was doing it.
I couldn’t. Thoughts of Bree as I had seen her late last night, peacefully asleep in her bed, assaulted me. The tendrils of remembered horror reached out from the hilltop above, as I began to sense the nearness of the stones. Screaming, chaos, the feeling of being torn in pieces. I couldn’t.
I couldn’t, but I kept on climbing, palms sweating, my feet moving as though no longer under my control.
It was full dawn by the time I reached the top of the hill. The mist lay below, and the stones stood clear and dark against a crystal sky. The sight of them left me wet-palmed with apprehension, but I walked forward, and passed into the circle.
They were standing on the grass in front of the cleft stone, facing each other. Brianna heard my footsteps and whirled around to face me.
I stared at her, speechless with astonishment. She was wearing a Jessica Gutenburg dress, very much like the one I had on, except that hers was a vivid lime green, with plastic jewels stitched across the bosom.
“That’s a perfectly horrible color for you,” I said.
“It’s the only one they had in a size sixteen,” she answered calmly.
“What in the name of goodness are you doing here?” I demanded, recovering some remnant of coherence.
“We came to see you off,” she said, and a hint of a smile flickered on her lips. I looked at Roger, who shrugged slightly and gave me a lopsided smile of his own.
“Oh. Yes. Well,” I said. The stone stood behind Brianna, twice the height of a man. I could look through the foot-wide crack, and see the faint morning sun shining on the grass outside the circle.
“You’re going,” she said firmly, “or I am.”
“You! Are you out of your mind?”
“No.” She glanced at the cleft stone and swallowed. It might have been the lime-green dress that made her face look chalk-white. “I can do it—go through, I mean. I know I can. When Geilie Duncan went through the stones, I heard them. Roger did too.” She glanced at him as though for reassurance, then fixed her gaze firmly on me.
“I don’t know whether I could find Jamie Fraser or not; maybe only you can. But if you won’t try, then I will.”
My mouth opened, but I couldn’t find anything to say.
“Don’t you see, Mama? He has to know—has to know he did it, he did what he meant to for us.” Her lips quivered, and she pressed them together for a minute.
“We owe it to him, Mama,” she said softly. “Somebody has to find him, and tell him.” Her hand touched my face, briefly. “Tell him I was born.”
“Oh, Bree,” I said, my voice so choked I could barely speak. “Oh, Bree!”
She was holding my hands tight between her own, squeezing hard.
“He gave you to me,” she said, so low I could hardly hear her. “Now I have to give you back to him, Mama.”
The eyes that were so like Jamie’s looked down at me, blurred by tears.
“If you find him,” she whispered, “when you find my father—give him this.” She bent and kissed me, fiercely, gently, then straightened and turned me toward the stone.
“Go, Mama,” she said, breathless. “I love you. Go!”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Roger move toward her. I took one step, and then another. I heard a sound, a faint roaring. I took the last step, and the world disappeared.
PART SIX
Edinburgh
24
A. MALCOLM, PRINTER
My first coherent thought was, “It’s raining. This must be Scotland.” My second thought was that this observation was no great improvement over the random images jumbling around inside my head, banging into each other and setting off small syn
aptic explosions of irrelevance.
I opened one eye, with some difficulty. The lid was stuck shut, and my entire face felt cold and puffy, like a submerged corpse’s. I shuddered faintly at the thought, the slight movement making me aware of the sodden fabric all around me.
It was certainly raining—a soft, steady drum of rain that raised a faint mist of droplets above the green moor. I sat up, feeling like a hippopotamus emerging from a bog, and promptly fell over backward.
I blinked and closed my eyes against the downpour. Some small sense of who I was—and where I was—was beginning to come back to me. Bree. Her face emerged suddenly into memory, with a jolt that made me gasp as though I’d been punched in the stomach. Jagged images of loss and the rip of separation pulled at me, a faint echo of the chaos in the stone passage.
Jamie. There it was; the anchor point to which I had clung, my single hold on sanity. I breathed slow and deep, hands folded over my pounding heart, summoning Jamie’s face. For a moment, I thought I had lost him, and then it came, clear and bold in my mind’s eye.
Once again, I struggled upright, and this time stayed, propped by my outstretched hands. Yes, certainly it was Scotland. It could hardly by anything else, of course, but it was also the Scotland of the past. At least, I hoped it was the past. It wasn’t the Scotland I’d left, at any rate. The trees and bushes grew in different patterns; there was a patch of maple saplings just below me that hadn’t been there when I’d climbed the hill—when? That morning? Two days ago?
I had no idea how much time had passed since I had entered the standing stones, or how long I had lain unconscious on the hillside below the circle. Quite a while, judging from the sogginess of my clothing; I was soaked through to the skin, and small chilly rivulets ran down my sides under my gown.
One numbed cheek was beginning to tingle; putting my hand to it, I could feel a pattern of incised bumps. I looked down and saw a layer of fallen rowan berries, gleaming red and black among the grass. Very appropriate, I thought, vaguely amused. I had fallen down under a rowan—the Highland protection against witchcraft and enchantment.
I grasped the smooth trunk of the rowan tree, and laboriously hauled myself to my feet. Still holding onto the tree for support, I looked to the northeast. The rain had faded the horizon to a gray invisibility, but I knew that Inverness lay in that direction. No more than an hour’s trip by car, along modern roads.
The road existed; I could see the outline of a rough track that led along the base of the hill, a dark, silvery line in the gleaming green wetness of the moor plants. However, forty-odd miles on foot was a far cry from the journey by car that had brought me here.
I was beginning to feel somewhat better, standing up. The weakness in my limbs was fading, along with the feeling of chaos and disruption in my mind. It had been as bad as I’d feared, this passage; perhaps worse. I could feel the terrible presence of the stones above me, and shuddered, my skin prickling with cold.
I was alive, though. Alive, and with a small feeling of certainty, like a tiny glowing sun beneath my ribs. He was here. I knew it now, though I hadn’t known it when I threw myself between the stones; that had been a leap of faith. But I had cast out my thought of Jamie like a lifeline tossed into a raging torrent—and the line had tightened in my grasp, and pulled me free.
I was wet, cold, and felt battered, as though I had been washing about in the surf against a rocky shore. But I was here. And somewhere in this strange country of the past was the man I had come to find. The memories of grief and terror were receding, as I realized that my die was cast. I could not go back; a return trip would almost surely be fatal. As I realized that I was likely here to stay, all hesitations and terrors were superseded by a strange calm, almost exultant. I could not go back. There was nothing to do but go forward—to find him.
Cursing my carelessness in not having thought to tell the tailor to make my cloak with a waterproof layer between fabric and lining, I pulled the water-soaked garment closer. Even wet, the wool held some warmth. If I began to move, I would grow warmer. A quick pat reassured me that my bundle of sandwiches had made the trip with me. That was good; the thought of walking forty miles on an empty stomach was a daunting one.
With luck, I wouldn’t have to. I might find a village or a house that had a horse I could buy. But if not, I was prepared. My plan was to go to Inverness—by whatever means offered itself—and there take a public coach to Edinburgh.
There was no telling where Jamie was at the moment. He might be in Edinburgh, where his article had been published, but he might easily be somewhere else. If I could not find him there, I could go to Lallybroch, his home. Surely his family would know where he was—if any of them were left. The sudden thought chilled me, and I shivered.
I thought of a small bookstore that I passed every morning on my way from the parking lot to the hospital. They had been having a sale on posters; I had seen the display of psychedelic examples when I left Joe’s office for the last time.
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” said one poster, above an illustration of a foolish-looking chick, absurdly poking its head out of an eggshell. In the other window, another poster showed a caterpillar, inching its way up a flower stalk. Above the stalk soared a brilliantly colored butterfly, and below was the motto “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
The most irritating thing about clichés, I decided, was how frequently they were true. I let go of the rowan tree, and started down the hill toward my future.
* * *
It was a long, jolting ride from Inverness to Edinburgh, crammed cheek by jowl into a large coach with two other ladies, the small and whiny son of one of the ladies, and four gentlemen of varying sizes and dispositions.
Mr. Graham, a small and vivacious gentleman of advanced years who was seated next to me, was wearing a bag of camphor and asafoetida about his neck, to the eyewatering discomfort of the rest of the coach.
“Capital for dispelling the evil humors of influenza,” he explained to me, waving the bag gently under my nose like a censer. “I have worn this daily through the autumn and winter months, and haven’t been sick a day in nearly thirty years!”
“Amazing!” I said politely, trying to hold my breath. I didn’t doubt it; the fumes probably kept everyone at such a distance that germs couldn’t reach him.
The effects on the little boy didn’t seem nearly so beneficial. After a number of loud and injudicious remarks about the smell in the coach, Master Georgie had been muffled in his mother’s bosom, from which he now peeped, looking rather green. I kept a close eye on him, as well as on the chamber pot beneath the seat opposite, in case quick action involving a conjunction of the two should be called for.
I gathered that the chamber pot was for use in inclement weather or other emergency, as normally the ladies’ modesty required stops every hour or so, at which point the passengers would scatter into the roadside vegetation like a covey of quail, even those who did not require relief of bladder or bowels seeking some relief from the stench of Mr. Graham’s asafoetida bag.
After one or two changes, Mr. Graham found his place beside me superseded by Mr. Wallace, a plump young lawyer, returning to Edinburgh after seeing to the disposition of the estate of an elderly relative in Inverness, as he explained to me.
I didn’t find the details of his legal practice nearly as fascinating as he did, but under the circumstances, his evident attraction to me was mildly reassuring, and I passed several hours in playing with him upon a small chess set that he produced from a pocket and laid upon his knee.
My attention was distracted both from the discomforts of the journey and the intricacies of chess by anticipation of what I might find in Edinburgh. A. Malcolm. The name kept running through my mind like an anthem of hope. A. Malcolm. It had to be Jamie, it simply had to! James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.
“Considering the way the Highland rebels were treated after Culloden, it would be very reasonable
for him to use an assumed name in a place like Edinburgh,” Roger Wakefield had explained to me. “Particularly him—he was a convicted traitor, after all. Made rather a habit of it, too, it looks like,” he had added critically, looking over the scrawled manuscript of the antitax diatribe. “For the times, this is bloody near sedition.”
“Yes, that sounds like Jamie,” I had said dryly, but my heart had leapt at the sight of that distinctively untidy scrawl, with its boldly worded sentiments. My Jamie. I touched the small hard rectangle in my skirt pocket, wondering how long it would be, before we reached Edinburgh.
The weather kept unseasonably fine, with no more than the occasional drizzle to hinder our passage, and we completed the journey in less than two days, stopping four times to change horses and refresh ourselves at posthouse taverns.
The coach debouched into a yard at the back of Boyd’s Whitehorse tavern, near the foot of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. The passengers emerged into the watery sunshine like newly hatched chrysalids, rumpled of wing and jerky in movement, unaccustomed to mobility. After the dimness of the coach, even the cloudy gray light of Edinburgh seemed blinding.
I had pins and needles in my feet from so long sitting, but hurried nonetheless, hoping to escape from the courtyard while my erstwhile companions were busy with the retrieval of their belongings. No such luck; Mr. Wallace caught up with me near the street.
“Mrs. Fraser!” he said. “Might I beg the pleasure of accompanying you to your destination? You will surely require some assistance in the removal of your luggage.” He looked over his shoulder toward the coach, where the ostlers were heaving the bags and portmanteaux apparently at random into the crowd, to the accompaniment of incoherent grunts and shouts.
“Er …” I said. “Thank you, but I … er, I’m leaving my luggage in charge of the landlord. My … my …” I groped frantically. “My husband’s servant will come fetch it later.”
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